Japanese Star’s Beginnings Revealed on New DVD

Lately Japanese cinema seems largely divided into either stylized action films keeping alive the tradition of cel animation instead of computer-rendered art, or horror films later watered down and remade by Hollywood. In the 1950s and 60s, master directors like Akira Kurosawa and actors like Toshiro Mifune created films that gave audiences around the world a rich picture of Japanese culture.

Although “discovered” by American moviegoers after World War II, Japanese cinema has a proud tradition back to the silent era, much of it destroyed during the war. What few realize, however, is that one of the first Japanese actor-producers to become a major star began his film career in Hollywood before the First World War.

Sessue Hayakawa (1889-1973) is known by casual film fans for his Oscar-nominated performance as the prison camp commandant in “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” But this was during his second Hollywood career, as a character actor, after having spent a quarter-century making films in Europe, mainly France.
Hayakawa had been a popular American matinee idol, however, the decade before that. During his first Hollywood career, he played a variety of important roles including heroes, villains, artists, and lovers--characters very much the opposite of the oriental stereotypes that pervaded many films of the time.

The son of a Japanese politician, Hayakawa had to cancel plans for a career in Japan’s navy due to health reasons. He came to the United States to study at the University of Chicago, later joining a theatrical troupe in Los Angeles and producing a Japanese cast version of the romantic melodrama “The Typhoon” on stage. When Hollywood producer Thomas H. Ince saw this, he decided to adapt it to the screen starring Hayakawa and his company.

Before filming that, however, he cast Hayakawa and his wife Tsuru Aoki in “The Wrath of the Gods,” a melodramatic spectacle inspired by the recent volcanic eruption in Sakua-Jima, Japan. In that film, Aoki plays Hayakawa’s daughter, and future director Frank Borzage plays an American sailor who falls in love with her despite an ancient curse on the family.

Both films were made in 1914, and Hayakawa’s film career took off rapidly. A year later he was starring in Cecil B. DeMille’s celebrated “The Cheat” and appeared in numerous films over the next few years, sometimes as a stereotyped villain but often as the romantic lead, even when this involved a then-touchy interracial relationship.

In 1919 Hayakawa was popular and wealthy enough that he started his own Hollywood studio with director William Worthington, called the Haworth Pictures Corporation. He hoped to counter the degrading image many films portrayed of Asians, making stories that showed a side of Japanese culture ignored by Hollywood. This he did successfully for two or three years until problems with the studio’s small distributor led to a court case and Hayakawa eventually giving up on Hollywood in favor of Paris. (In 1937 he recreated his role from “The Cheat” in a French-language version of the story.)

Among the first and best of the Haworth films was “The Dragon Painter,” an allegorical story set in modern (1919) Japan, again co-starring his wife. Hayakawa plays Tatsu, a half-insane artist who lives outdoors amid the beauties of nature, painting with a wild, untrained genius, obsessed with the idea that he had a fiancée who was turned into a dragon a thousand years before and that she’s hiding in the mountains. A surveyor happens upon him and brings him to the city to meet Kano, an aging Japanese artist who has no heir and no students worthy of carrying on his name or his work.
Tatsu has no desire to remain in the city until he starts to believe that Kano’s daughter Ume-Ko is his long-lost princess reincarnated. The problem is, that once his love is satisfied, he can no longer paint, leading to tragic complications as well as deeper philosophical implications regarding art and love, and the traditional and the modern.

“The Dragon Painter” has very much a feeling of a Japanese film rather than a Hollywood production. It is based on a 1906 novel by Mary McNeil Fenollosa, a scholar interested in preserving and promoting Japanese culture and art. The film version, however, was lost for over a half-century. All prints had disappeared except for one in France, which in the 1970s was copied onto color safety film to preserve its tints and tones. In 1985 the intertitles were translated back into English and in 1994 a new Japanese-style score was commissioned. Now, on March 18, 2008, this restored version finally becomes available to the general public on DVD.

Milestone Film and Video’s new DVD includes fine video transfers not only of “The Dragon Painter,” but the full-length co-feature “The Wrath of the Gods” (also color tinted and with a new score), as well as a short comic film from 1921 featuring Hayakawa with comedy stars Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Charles Murray (which was provided by the late Rusty Casselton of MSUM). Both feature films are from the collection of the George Eastman House.

Also on the DVD are a stills gallery, and DVD-ROM accessible pdf files providing the complete original novel of “The Dragon Painter,” the original screenplay for “The Wrath of the Gods,” an informative presskit of background information about both films, a chapter on Asian-themed films from an upcoming book on Thomas Ince, and instructions on building your own mini-volcano (including weblinks to a UND internet site with more information). The screenplay is an especially fascinating document of how carefully films were planned out in great detail before production, even in 1914.

If you can’t find “The Dragon Painter” DVD at local stores, it can be ordered on line from www.milestonefilms.com directly. The original version of “The Cheat” has been available for some time on Cecil B. DeMille DVDs from both Image Entertainment (paired with “Carmen") and Kino Video (paired with “Manslaughter").